GMVault lets you back up your Gmail account in a breeze

By Gene Ryan Briones on 05/07/2012

If you are a Gmail user, perhaps you’d like to check out GMVault. It’s a simple to use app that will sync and back-up your Gmail account on your local machine. GMVault is a shell script available for Windows, OS X and Linux. So, why bother trying it when you can accomplish the same thing with a desktop email client?

Well, with GMVault, you can make sure that your back-up is updated daily. Just move your database to a new location when the backup is done, and you’ll get incremental snapshot backups of your Gmail account. You can also restore emails to any Gmail account. When you create a new Gmail account, just select your current account’s backup and use the restore command to recreate your mailboxes. By doing so, all attributes such as Gmail labels are preserved and recreated into the new account.

In case you’re concerned about security (and you should be!), perhaps you’ll be relieved to know that GMVault will encrypt your saved email repository to keep it safe from prying eyes. That means that you can use Dropbox or any similar web-based backup services without worrying about your personal information getting exposed. But since GMVault is currently a beta software, you might encounter a few bugs here and there. Either way, it’s a great backup tool for Gmail. You can get GMVault via GitHub.